


You Are a House on Fire

by DesdemonaKaylose



Series: Telltale Batjokes [2]
Category: Batman: The Telltale Series (Video Game)
Genre: Getting to Know Each Other, M/M, Season 2 Episode 1, Stand Alone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-08-29
Packaged: 2018-12-18 21:46:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11883474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: "John" continues to insinuate himself into Bruce's life





	You Are a House on Fire

**Author's Note:**

> lifted the title from a [Listener song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTThespmdOY), for anyone keeping track. I actually wrote this one before the other one but, since they kind of happen in the opposite order, I flipped them around.

When you schedule an interview with someone, you typically expect to be seen right away. That’s a privilege of wealth, of course, people always wanting something from you, but you can’t say you don’t appreciate getting right to the point. Today you’ve been waiting for ten minutes in this chair outside the bank chairman’s office and your hopes of getting finished here in time to get back to the isotope decaying in your cave (before it degrades entirely) are quickly deflating. Some days you really resent yourself for choosing to get so deeply involved in running the business side of the company. There’s so many more pressing things you could be doing. For example, not sitting in this chair.

“I can’t _tell you_ how much I appreciate it,” you hear, approaching from beyond the marble columns of the hall. “I’m just— _mortified_ , forgetting a thing like that!”

You stiffen, attention snapping to the sound of that familiar voice. He comes around the corner, bounding along beside the chairman’s secretary, who seems bemused by the whole thing. As soon as he sees you, though, he lights up in whole different way—you’ve heard the expression “lights up” many times, but there’s something about the way _he_ does it that really makes you understand why people use that idiom. It’s like something fundamental changed in his chemical makeup. Like you dropped an acid into a vat of reactant. It's a worrying glow.

“Thanks for your help Lila,” John says, without looking away from you for a second. “I’ll make sure Mr. Wayne gets the right ones.”

“Um,” Lila says. “Well, alright then. Just shout if you need anything else.”

John narrows his eyes. “Oh, I certainly will.”

You wait until the sound of Lila’s heels have faded into marble silence before you lean forward and whisper, “John, what the hell are you doing here?”

He grins at you, with his teeth not quite as white as his skin. “Well obviously,” he says, “someone had to make sure you had the right stock portfolio.” From the briefcase at his side (where did he get a thing like that?) he whips out a binder with blue clips that looks exactly like—

You pop open your own briefcase and find it empty, entirely so, nothing but the pens tucked neatly into tiny pockets. That is _your_ binder in his hands.

    That is a confidential document  
    Give that back   
    >How did you get that

Part of you wants to tell him that what he's holding is a highly private financial document. Part of you wants to tell him to give it back, right _now_. But what actually comes out of your mouth is, “John, did you steal that from me?”

John recoils. “Oh no, Bruce, buddy, I would never steal from _you_. I’m making sure you get it back.”

“But you took it from me,” you say.

He shakes his head, earnest. “You never _had_ it,” he says. “I couldn’t _take_ it.”

Your head is hurting. Trying to talk to John is sometimes like trying to paddle against a whirlpool. You give up and hold your hand out for him, and he happily presses the binder into your grip. A quick flip through tells you that none of the pages appear to be missing. You don’t know why you’re bothering to check, really. John may be as disturbed as he is disturbing, but he hasn’t ever shown any signs of corporate espionage. While you’re inspecting, he helps himself to the seat beside you and curls up in it, tucking his legs underneath him. He leans into your shoulder, a forearm slung over your shared armrests.

“Big meeting?” he says.

He’s dressed in a nice waistcoat and a dress shirt again, a little eccentric but professional enough to pass for--your assistant? Is that what he's doing? Somehow you expected his shirt to be wrinkled, but the closer you look at it the more it seems like it’s been ironed. You're wrong again. You consider yourself a _fairly_ good detective, but you literally cannot get a read on this strange, sinister man who is currently flipping through your financial report to reveal to you a series of surrealist cartoons unfolding into graphite action at the bottom of the pages. When did he have time to draw those? Is that the coyote from Looney Tunes?

“How did you find me?” you ask him. “How do you keep finding me?”

“Now, Mr. Wayne,” he says in a playful scolding tone, “you must know you’re a _public_ _figure_.”

“Not _that_ public,” you point out.

“But I keep close tabs on my friends,” John says. “You never know when your buddy is gonna find himself in a spot of trouble! Why, just think what would have happened if you went off today without me to look out for you!”

It’s probably pointless to remind him that he’s the reason you didn’t have your papers. Especially because, somewhere deep in your gut, you’re not entirely sure if that’s really the case. But what else could it be?

“You’re a man who needs looking after,” John says, propping his chin up on his hand. He looks up at you with his wide grey eyes, a secret smile tugging at the edges of his lips. “A little help from your friends! I knew it from the moment I heard you in that cell at Arkham. What you need is a little guardian angel.”

You can feel in your gut where this is going, feel the shape of it if not the wiggly particulars. Should you shut him down right there? This conversation is already veering way out of your control. Should you humor him? He’s been a useful ally in his own unnerving way, thus far.

    I can look out for myself  
    I appreciate the thought  
    >Why do you worry about that?

What you say is:

“Why me?”

John rocks back, incredulous and delighted. He gives a knowing look to something over your shoulder. “I’d love to tell you,” he says, “but your guy is right on the other side of that door, and this little conference of yours is no place for a humble secretary.”

You can’t help but turn to look at the door. There’s a slight creak, as if someone who was leaning on the wood suddenly pulled back. When you turn back to John, he’s already up out of his seat, brushing wrinkles that don't exist from his shirt. He salutes you.

“Let’s have a drink,” he says. “Give me a call when you're done, _friend_.” And with a wink, he’s gone. You flip to the last page of your report and find exactly what you’re expecting to find. It’s another cell phone number, with little smiley faces in the zeros. It’s a different number from the last time he contacted you. Clearly a burner.

“Mr. Rappaccini,” you say, tiredly, “please let me in so we can start this meeting, already.”

For a moment, it’s quiet. Then the door slowly creaks open.

 

 

“I saw you give an interview once,” John says, sucking a black cherry from its stem and talking around the pit.

It’s a tourist bar, not quite a trap, located along the brightly lit strip at the north end of the city, full of Midwesterners who want to be able to tell their friends they visited Gotham and lived to tell the tale, but not quite brave enough to step off the tightly patrolled uptown strip. You stare down the decorative gargoyle peering over the liquor counter, ceramic white and shiny and clean. Its open mouth seems to be laughing at you. The good thing about this place is that most tourists won’t know your face. Maybe they know your name, if they follow politics, but Gotham is peculiarly insular in that way. When scandal rips the city wide open, the rest of the world whistles and discusses the weather.

It feels sometimes like you all live in the eye of a hurricane.

“I don’t give interviews,” you tell him.

“ _Sure_ you do,” he says, leaning forward. “I remember it. A couple years ago. You were promoting some legislation, a children’s care bill. A favor to your friend Dr. Thompkins.”

That stops you short. You _did_ do that. It was just a local story, filler time between the day’s weather and the 11 o’clock news. You didn’t really think anyone had cared enough to watch it, or to remember it. That was before you got openly political. Before Harvey asked you to.

John swallows the pit like it doesn’t even bother him, like it’s just part of the cherry. You watch his throat in horror. Hydrogen cyanide isn’t present in high enough levels for one cherry pit to do any real damage, but if he keeps doing that he’s going to hurt himself.

“Everyone _always_ wants to talk about your parents sooner or later, have you noticed that? Of course you have. You’re living it!”

You watch in growing unease as he pulls another cherry from his overloaded martini and pops it whole into his mouth.

“You were talking about growing up alone,” John says. His expression softens for a moment, the manic tension smoothed from his features. “You'd given up on being saved, you said. I’ll never forget it. The look on your face—it was like I could see right down into the heart of you, and it was black and it was _beautiful_ , and I understood everything perfectly.”

He looks past you, at the memory of another Bruce in another moment, his eyes gentle with a nostalgia or a _longing,_ maybe, and it's like he unfolds for you—just for a moment, and you think—you think maybe you know what he means. For a moment as he regards the black shiny heart-shape of the cherry between his fingers, you feel like you are seeing something secret and bloody and terrible at the core of him, the bleeding place where truth lays like a wound. His strangeness isn’t alien anymore, it’s painfully human. You understand something fundamental about him, in the space of that heartbeat, something that you will never be able to explain to another person. Something you will carry with you to your grave.

“Of course,” John says, shrugging it off all at once, “that’s a common delusion caused by the illusion of familiarity which celebrity necessitates. But I was right about you,” he says, looking up, “wasn’t I?”

You try not to show how shaken you are. “Those cherry pits,” you say, your voice sticking and stumbling in your throat. “They’re poisonous. You’ll get sick if you keep eating them.”

John looks back down at the cherry in his hand. He looks at it hard. And then he crushes it between his fingers. “It’s hard out here,” he says again, eyes fixed on the pit that glares up through the wounded cherry flesh. “It’s hard to be the new guy.”

"I'm... sorry," you say.

He carefully lays the pit on the table top, pinning it under one pale, ragged finger. "Don't be sorry, Brucie," he says. "Maybe that's just the first step."

 

 

The first thing you do when you get home is go clicking deep into the internet to find the one place where someone found it relevant to post a daytime filler piece from GCTV five years ago.

The interview is supposed to be about something else. But they’re also trying to bring a little bit of human interest to the project, so you watch the Bruce on screen as he grows more and more quiet under the pressure of so many personal questions. You fast forward through it. You don’t want to watch any more of this Bruce ineptly mangling your shared secrets than you have to. Finally, you catch the moment you remember. You hit pause and rewind, back it up to just after the interviewer has asked:

“Did you want someone to save you?”

Bruce looks at the camera, reserved expression cracking into something that almost bleeds uncertainty. You remember that he’s thinking about all the children out there, who might happen to be watching this. He’s thinking about the things people told him when _he_ was small and afraid. “Of course,” he says. “For a long time, I thought… if the police could just dig up the right clue, everything could be solved. Everything would be fixed.”

“But that never happened.”

Bruce is still watching the camera, his fingers clasped over his mouth. “No. No, and now that I’m older I know that it wouldn’t have fixed the problem with _me._ Even justice doesn’t bring the dead back to life.”

The interviewer is quiet for a moment. “So,” she says, “have you given up?”

You hold this Bruce’s gaze, remembering the thoughts that raced through his head–-fear, resentment, hope–-and the beginnings of an idea so strange and awful that it just might be your shared salvation, or your shared ruin.

“I’ve given up,” he says, “on wishing for someone to save me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the interviewer says. “That seems…. very sad.”

“Maybe it’s not,” Bruce says. He is still looking hard at the camera, seeing through it into a night which will come soon enough; beyond himself and into the city that is crying out even now for rescue. He says, “Maybe it’s the first step to doing something truly powerful.”

You hit pause. You think of John, and the captivating ugliness that moves through the core of him. You know that he let you see that. In a way, he was stripping himself down for you, opening himself up to you, as if the only way to answer your pedestrian question of _why me_ was to show you _why him_ in return. You can't shake the memory from your head.

You put on some Vivaldi, and you try to think instead of summer storms, composers, violins. They seem less dangerous than the earnest truth you have been burdened with.

 


End file.
